Assessing the effects of information on the level of support toward charismatic and inconspicuous wildlife species in a highly threatened wetland by the urban population of Valdivia, Chile

The inclusion of human communities into practical conservation of threatened species has received increasing recognition. One way to achieve this is to understand the current (actual) relation between people and wildlife in a specific territory (1,2,3). The advantage of such understanding is to predict public support towards wildlife species, and therefore develop accurate environmental management strategies (2). The willingness to pay method has been used for this purpose (3). Based on surveys, this method elicits the level of support of people by identifying the amount of money that a person would be willing to give to support conservation activities (3). In the present study it will be u…